OK, here goes. I have no artistic ability so I’m going to come at this from a purely technical perspective.
First and foremost, put information in your Title tags on every single page. This is important. It’s how some search engines display the link to your website and having the pages named “Home” and “Front Page” are meaningless and amateurish and do nothing help your placement on search engines.
Dump the sound entirely. Just about no one likes it.
You need to decide if you want your website to be a eCommerce site or a Branding site. Generally speaking splash pages like your landing page is a bad idea for anything that seeks to sell something or provide information. You might be able to get away with it if you are a band or a major brand where projecting an image takes precedence over content and ease of use. You probably want to get your product in from of peoples eyes as immediately as possible. Many people will reach your home page and never go past that, those people have no idea what you do or what your work looks like.
It seem that your web graphics and the general look of your website have very little similarity to your actual art. That’s a bad thing. If I land on your home page it takes me 2 clicks to actually see your art. That’s 2 too many. If I just land on your home page I’ll think that that giant name and logo is indicative of your work…it’s not. You should probably co-op some of your paintings for logos instead of what looks like simple clipart. Why wouldn’t you crop this painting and use it for your logo as opposed to repeating this?
The blue background is too much. There’s nothing wrong with having a lot of color on your page, but I don’t think having that color washing across the screen from one side to the other is a good idea. Look at how these sites use colored backgrounds to frame and give depth to a design but they confine the information to a more neutral color that has boundaries. Site1 Site2 Site3 Site4 Site5
When I reach your home page it takes me a minute to figure out what to do. This is bad. The cursive print and arrows are a nifty gimmick but they aren’t intuitive ways for most web users to get instructions. All that would be solved if you ditched the splash page and used a basic menu page as your landing page. Get rid of unnecessary layer of complexity.
You might want to consider Watermarking the images on the site, just to protect yourself from people co-opting them for avatars and stuff without attribution.
I think you should find a better way to frame your art individually. Renee is correct that the framing helps but I think you should go a step further and tighten it up to a single view that eliminates scrolling. If this means you have multiple pages so be it.
Check out the gallery section of the artists site here. This is obviously a very professional website that is technically beyond your means I’m sure, but you can take a few instructions from it:
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[li]He uses his art as the banner/header which is the backdrop for his name and logo. This draws the attention to the product which is great, you don’t want the big, bold letters of your name to draw the attention, especially since designing fonts/logos isn’t your skill. [/li][li]He uses a splash page, which I don’t agree with, but it’s very clear what the next step is and has a hyperlink on it which people know how to react to. Until you have a famous name I think splash pages are a bad idea. Your site should begin like his homepage. [/li][li]Notice how he has a very clear navigation menu that resides entirely above the fold, it requires no scrolling. Whether you use frames or not is up to you, it’s effective here but many people dislike it. I do like that his banner and nav bar is consistent at the top of all the pages, this is a good design whether it’s within a frame or not. [/li][li]He uses the color grey as a backdrop that frames and gives depth for the black text and galleries. [/li][/ul]
In short I would combine your “Home” page and your “Front Page” into one simple page. You should replace the simple gifs that make up your icons and logo with your actual art. You should make a cleaner, more utilitarian nav bar that resides entirely above the fold of a 800x600 resolution, ideally on the top half of that. You should have a consistent header that remains consistent on every page using either a invisible frame or just a template. Consider using the blue as a background but add a more neutral color as a layer over the top with a shadow to give depth.
It also makes me want to show it to my friends, thus good word-of-mouth. Impressive work!
